Quotes from D. J. Taylor

The Victorians pioneered numbers of commercial rackets about which their descendants complain (the manufacturers of Bovril, it appears, were virtually official sponsors of the Boer War).

There was dust everywhere: dust on the cracked and rheumy window; dust over the drugget that made shift as Mr. Guyle's carpet; dust on the framed portraits of my lords Eldon, Coke and other luminaries that hung on the wall; and dust, it may be presumed, in the ventricles of Mr. Guyle's ancient legal heart.